Melting the LHC: a search for long-lived gluinos in liquid detector materials

Samuel Wong, University of Washington
PAT C-421

Particles at the TeV scale with lifetimes of a year or longer could have been abundantly produced at the LHC yet escaped detection because of backgrounds, and could still be trapped within detector materials. With gluinos in split-supersymmetry as a working example, we show that these trapped particles can be recovered from detector materials once prepared in liquid form, for example, by constructing a large water pool near ATLAS or CMS, extracting liquid argon from electromagnetic calorimeters, or melting silicon detectors. These liquid samples can then be processed using iterative centrifugation followed by mass spectrometry, enabling single-particle sensitivity in macroscopic samples. This method can potentially discover gluinos up to 3 TeV in mass at the HL-LHC.

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